Posted on 10/07/2007 9:40:23 AM PDT by Graybeard58
We thought the day would never come when a Republican political leader and an animal-rights extremist would weigh in on the same subject, and we'd agree with the extremist. But that day arrived recently with comments by chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall and Gov. M. Jodi Rell, who hold contrasting positions on biofuels.
In a speech last week, Ms. Goodall complained the biofuels boom is destroying the world's rain forests. "We're cutting down forests now to grow sugar cane and palm oil for biofuels, and our forests are being hacked into by so many interests that it makes them more and more important to save now," she said during an environmental conference in New York on Sept. 27.
Ms. Goodall is correct. In Indonesia, Africa and South America, growers are leveling rain forests to produce palm oil, sugar cane and other crops that yield ethanol and biodiesel.
Substituting these fuels for petroleum products may have slight atmospheric benefits, but the influence of rain forests on climate is little understood, so destroying them at the rate of one New Jersey-sized area every year — as Brazil is doing — seems a good deal crazier than burning coal or oil in emissions-controlled power plants.
Gov. Rell, meanwhile, announced Tuesday a 10,000-gallon underground storage tank at the state-run Buckingham Street garage in Hartford will be converted from unleaded gasoline to E-85, a blend with 15 percent gasoline and 85 percent ethanol. "My energy vision for Connecticut includes making sure state government leads the way in reducing consumption and shifting to more efficient and less-polluting forms of energy," she said.
Maybe someone should tell her that if she wants efficiency, unleaded gasoline is the answer.
Consumer Reports magazine tested flex-fuel cars last year and found E-85 extracted a 27 percent fuel-economy penalty. The addition of ethanol at the Buckingham Street garage and, eventually, other state facilities, also will require additional delivery trucks, each belching diesel fumes.
Even if Gov. Rell isn't concerned about the effects of biofuels production on rain forests, there are deep and worsening problems with America's corn-based ethanol industry.
Experts are growing increasingly alarmed about food prices, pollution from pesticides and fertilizers used by corn growers, and the lowering of the water table in areas where farmers have to irrigate their crops.
Gov. Rell should listen to Ms. Goodall. Ethanol is the wrong way to go, from an environmental and fiscal point of view.
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And the bumper sticker reads,” burn oil save a forest”
Yup. I cover the IRL for an auto racing publication, and I’m supposed to believe in Ethanol, but there are obvious problems with this solution.
The stuff works in a car — that’s not a problem. The problem is that the process of getting corn to fuel takes more energy than it yields. Conversely, petroleum (which is simply biofuel that nature processed for a few bazillion years) has lots of stored energy inside of it, and the process of getting it to your tank takes less energy than you get when you burn it.
Economics definitely kick in here. In Econ 101, the prof always uses grain as an example of perfect competition. If the demand for a grain goes up, it then lowers the supply of other grains in the short term. In the long term, the concept of “economic rent” kicks in, where we see that marginal farm land is pushed into production since the crops grown there are profitable enough to justify the effort.
So, yes, even if ethanol is suddenly viable, and even if we figure out a great way to refine biostuff into fuel, the result will be a massive expansion of food production and a probably rise in food prices.
My local big dairy farmer tells me that he loves the higher corn prices, but says that the price of dairy feed is now so high that he can’t turn a profit with his cows.
If he's really serious, why doesn't he install a wind turbine and a bunch of solar panels and be driven around in an electric car?
So price rises when one expands production? C'mon now. That's surely not what you meant to say.
Probably you intended something more like, ''...the result will be a massive expansion of food production. If this expansion is not large enough to meet the increased demand caused by the subsidised and/or forced usage of ethanol, a secondary result will be a rise in food prices.''
Which, given wheat over $9/bu and corn and beans well higher than 2 years ago, would seem now to be a fait accompli.
So price rises when one expands production? C'mon now. That's surely not what you meant to say.
Probably you intended something more like, ''...the result will be a massive expansion of food production. If this expansion is not large enough to meet the increased demand caused by the subsidised and/or forced usage of ethanol, a secondary result will be a rise in food prices.''
Which, given wheat over $9/bu and corn and beans well higher than 2 years ago, would seem now to be a fait accompli.
My apologies for the double post!
She.
A few on the left, like Ms. Goodell, understand what is coming. However, control hungry socialists will shout down these voices of descent and give the west the type of environmental paradises we now have in Communist China and the former Soviet Union.
Cutting down forests, and replanting them, really ends up sequestering far more CO2, than allowing the old-growth forest to stand. Old trees only absorb enough CO2 to provide for their relatively miniscule addition to growth, and for the propagation of seeds. The spent parts of its growth, the core of the limbs and trunk, is dead, and is not involved in the further sequestering of CO2. Besides, this is all just fuel for some future forest burn.
New growth, on the other hand, gulps huge quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere, as all the plant structures are being constructed, literally, from thin air. There are a small number of micronutrients taken up, as well as phosphorus, potassium and various nitrogen compounds, but the nitrogen usually cycles back to the atmosphere rather quickly, as the amino acid of which it had been a part of, is decomposed by biological processes. The phosphorus and potassium remain in the structure of the stored carbohydrates of which the growing plant is composed and is released when the cellulose is burned, as part of the mineral ash that remains (pot ash, potassium, get it?)
Trees have this huge advantage, in that all the CO2 released kupon the combustion of wood was made up entirely of CO2 that had only relatively recently been sequestered, and effectively, does not alter the CO2 balance.
Far better than growing sugar cane (which in itself consumes huge quantities of CO2), the reduction of the wood waste from timbering into kerogen, a substance similar to light crude oil, by a process known as Thermal Depolymerization, produces a very useful chemical feedstock that does not tap into the remaining fossil fuels trapped beneath the earth’s surface.
The world shall NEVER run out of petroleum. It can be synthesized in industrial quantities, at a price competitive with current recovery costs for fossil petroleum. And while using existing technology.
Good thing we ain't letting that horrible DDT back .......Lettum swat the skeeters?
No reason to. I guarantee you the outcome that will take the most tax dollars out of our pockets will win. Always does :-)
Just an added benefit. MY plan for the rain forests was to turn them all into patio furniture. But you can only sell so many Adirondack chairs ...
Give me a break. If this is true, then Brazil should be a giant parking lot by 2020.
Wahh wahhh wahhh wahhh! What a bunch of BS. Show me where "rain forests" are being cut down to grow sugar cane and palm oil. And not the usual stock photos of the same log being cut down 20 years ago to build a road in Brazil. There has been unprecedented REGROWTH of forest, and farmland has been abandoned and taken back over by natural prairie plains grasses all over North America's mid west because of unprecedented farm failures brought on by ever increasing input costs while commodity markets prices have been at all time lows for the last decade. "Ms. Goodall is correct. In Indonesia, Africa and South America, growers are leveling rain forests to produce palm oil, sugar cane and other crops that yield ethanol and biodiesel."
All Goodall the monkey lover is concerned about is monkeys. The more land she can snatch away and label as eco sensitive Monkey habitat through the UN the better. She hopes that after decades of trying, she will find a monkey somewhere that will knock her up.
No they won't. They'll be burning bio diesel, All they will beltch is the smell of french fries, and make people hungry. This is a pathetic hit piece by the anti-human enviro freaks. There is no truth at all in this piece.
Bingo!
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